Sherri Travis, the narrator and central figure in Phyllis Smallman’s highly readable series, is 30ish and lippy. By impulse, she noses into any suspicious circumstances that come her way; by profession, she co-owns and manages the Sunset Bar and Grill on Florida’s west coast. Since Smallman, a Canadian, spends winters in the same Gulf of Mexico area, she’s adept at faithfully evoking the sense of place. Florida has never seemed so appealing and appalling as it does in the Sherri Travis novels.

As Highball Exit opens, Sherri’s luck is headed toward its usual destination — into the tank. The lousy Florida economy threatens the Sunset’s continued existence. Sherri’s boyfriend appears to be prepping for a breakup. And Sherri is drawn into a case involving a young woman friend who has apparently committed suicide, leaving behind a baby who can’t be found. Sherri sets out to track the baby and maybe, incidentally, to check that the death was really a suicide.

Sherri offers many of the right qualities for a sleuth. “I seem to have a face that leads people to confide in me,” she says. That’s correct. But as Sherri also adds, “it makes them trust me enough to dump all over me.” In other words, Sherri’s adventures, and the books that chronicle them, move in the manner of a roller coaster. There’s a lot to be said for a sensation like that in anybody’s crime fiction.

Burning Midnight

By Loren Estleman

Forge, 287 pages, $28.99

Estleman writes fast and hard-boiled. He’s the author of 48 novels, this book numbering the 22nd featuring the Detroit private eye, Amos Walker. Walker is such an old-fashioned shamus that he chain-smokes, speaks only in wisecracks and can count on getting knocked out at least twice in the course of every case. This time around, he’s hired to chase down a non-criminal Hispanic kid who has disappeared into the gangs of Detroit’s Mexicantown. The particular locale puts a new slant on Walker’s sleuthing, and his crime-busting leads to a finale that comes as a large surprise to Walker and, more to the point, to us readers.

In the Darkness

By Karin Fossum

Harvill Secker, 314 pages, $22

Until now, Canadian readers assumed that the marvelous Fossum series featuring Norwegian Inspector Konrad Sejer began with Don’t Look Back, published in English in 2004. But it turns out that In the Darkness was the real Sejer debut, written in 1993 and translated just last year. The new book comes as a surprise but also, alas, as a disappointment. The Sejer we’ve come to welcome is subtle and likeable. In In the Darkness, he’s not quite either. Fossum was a beginning writer back then, not one who had found her bearings, and though this version of Sejer has all the right trappings, he seems outsized and awkward.

The Racketeer

By John Grisham

Doubleday, 343 pages, $32

Grisham’s novel has been hanging around the best-seller lists for a few weeks now. It’s easy to see why. Grisham is the master of the school of telling the readers what happens rather than showing them, and there’s a huge market for that kind of thing.

In the new book, an Afro-American lawyer is sentenced to prison for a white collar crime he didn’t commit. He sets out to get even with the FBI, the prosecutors and everybody else who locked him up. In ways that might baffle even the Perry Masons of the world, the jailed lawyer succeeds.

Jack Batten is a Toronto author who writes the Whodunit column every second Sunday.

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